The new GeoNetwork opensource comes with substantial upgrades of different components for a more intuitive and responsive user-system interaction. Web2 technologies have been adopted, in particular AJAX techniques, to allow for more interactive and faster services in the web interface and for the integration of the existing web map viewer in the home page. Similar functionalities have been implemented in the administrative part of the system, to provide an easier access to the configuration pages related to site settings, catalogue harvesting, scheduling and maintenance.

The search interface has been completely overhauled to provide highly interactive searching capabilities. Furthermore, the new version of GNos embeds GeoServer as map server. Users can now not only overlay OGC web map services available on the web, but also create their own map services for other users to browse without having to download additional plugins. Maps created with web map services can be now saved as PDF and sent to others.

The metadata catalogue handles the latest ISO19115:2003 geographic metadata format based on the ISO19139:2007 schemas, as well as the older ISO19115 final draft format, FGDC and Dublin Core. The metadata editor is able to handle the majority of these complex standards, providing default, advanced and XML editing online tools.

The new version has a number of different harvesting interfaces allowing users to connect their own server to many other catalogues around the world. This is the result of the implementation of the open source reference for the web catalog services according to OGC specifications. Harvesting in the new version is fully compatible with GeoNetwork 2.0 and higher nodes.

We have added avanced online and offline administration funcionalities to configure, backup and migrate the application. We have also added a convenient import and export format “MEF” or Metadata Exchange Format, that allows the users to move metadata, previews and even data in a convenient single file. GNos can be easily expanded with plugins to export/import metadata to/from other software supporting MEF.

Some general system requirements for the software to run without problems are listed below:

Processor : 1 GHz or higher

Memory (RAM) : 512 MB or higher

Disk Space : 30 MB minimum. However, it is suggested to have a minimum of 250 MB of free disk space. Additional space is required depending on the amount of spatial data that you expect to upload into the internal geodatabse.

Other Software requirements : A Java Runtime Environment (JRE 1.5.0). For server installations, Apache Tomcat and a dedicated JDBC compliant DBMS (MySQL, Postgresql, Oracle) can be used instead of Jetty and McKoiDB respectively.

Follow the instructions on screen. You can choose to install sample data, install the embedded map server (based on GeoServer and the CSW 2.0.1 test client. Developers may be interested in installing the source code and installer building tools. Full source code can be found in the GeoNetwork SubVersion code repository.

After completion of the installation process, a ‘GeoNetwork desktop’ menu will be added to your Windows Start menu under ‘Programs’

Click Start>Programs>GeoNetwork desktop>Start server to start the Geonetwork opensource Web server. The first time you do this, the system will require about 1 minute to complete startup.

If you downloaded the platform independent installer (a .jar file), you can perform commandline installations on computers without a graphical interface. You first need to generate an install script (see Figure Save the installation script for commandline installations). This install script can be edited in a text editor to change some installation parameters.

To run the installation from the commandline, issue the following command in a terminal window and hit enter to start: